Hours after Microsoft launched Office 365 on Tuesday, Google announced the soft-launch of it's new social networking site aimed to fix what they consider to be the "awkward" and "broken" rigidness of online sharing.

The Google+ Project is designed around the user's social circles to more closely resemble "real life" compared to other social networking sites like Facebook. It allows for selectively sharing information within groups, or 'Circles', instead of sharing all content within a user's social connections. Simply drag and drop your friends into buckets to form groups and you have total control over who sees what.

Similar to Facebook, photos can be imported to Google+ in mass, including easy upload from your mobile phone. Like a Facebook NewsFeed or Twitter timeline, Google+ is powered by a centralized stream to easily access status updates, photos, videos, links, or interact with content from your Circles and Sparks; which matches stories, photos and videos with your interests. 'Hangouts' allow you to video chat with one person or multiple users, while 'Huddle' is for group chats via text messaging.

Google+ is in limited field trial; meaning only a select number of users are invited via email to help smooth out any kinks that may arise. There's no timetable as to when it will become available for everyone, but you can sign up for an email notification.

Brad Shimmin, an analyst with CurrentAnalysis, see's Google's announcement as another move in it's enterprise battle with Microsoft in addition to it's obvious competition with Facebook.

"The one major downfall of Google Apps has been a lack of a unifying social experience," Shimmin told Computerworld. "They've had some social tools inside different products but they haven't had anything to sort of bring them together. This is a very necessary and long-overdue step."

With 500 million users worldwide, people are spending more and more time on Facebook. Semil Shah, an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer internet and social networks, believes that Google's underlying fear is the day people stop searching through keywords and conduct more searches through their friends online. His example is that we may chose our next vacation based on seeing where our friends have been, but we will still ask them questions about the trip. How might Google help? With a focus on searching through user-generated content where much of our search is conducted through social questions, not keyword-oriented searches.

With some enterprise tweaks, Google+ is a collaboration platform aimed to combat rivals across the board.